privatizing our relationships discards the village from their role as sacred witness

Inspired by my friend Forest’s podcast on codependent relationships, I wanted to write about how our patterns of codependency and nuclear partnerships reproduce isolation by hiding from community witness.

Forest is a deep teacher for me, and in a lot of ways we teach each other. We’re committed to engaging with hierarchical structures and asking whether they are necessary for our planet to survive and thrive. Relationship Ecology is in many ways, a philosophy that has a nuanced approach to power. It is not asking for a destruction of power itself, but of aspiring towards a free exchange of power, so that we can experience and trust in the ebbs and flow without a need to hoard and hold onto what we have.

Our relationships are the practice grounds for building and cultivating community, village, and power. Our relationships reflect our values, our dreams, our beliefs. Through them, we can witness where we are in this moment in life. Do we feel like we can be ourselves in our relationships? Do we feel like in our relationships we are living into the radical imagination of what we feel we are longing for?

I see relationships as a place where we can live at the edges of societal norms. We can cultivate a world of safety in our relationships and by doing so, have the scaffolding we need to explore farther into the realm of the creative unknown.

One of the practices that I have been excited to practice in my community has been the opening of relational dynamics to be witnessed, supported, and guided by those beyond the nucleus of a partnership. What is often unspoken but felt is the energy field of a nucleus pair, a bonding between two humans that create a center of gravity.

Their ruptures, disagreements, harmony, and flow affect those who live with them and around them. To intentionally orbit around each other is to cultivate energy, and if one sees power as the will to self-manifest, deep nuclear relationships have the potential to be incredibly powerful and… destructive.

This capitalist imperialist worldview that we look through, is one that sees privatization as safety. It tells a story that by privatizing and creating clear models of ownership, we can control and dictate the outcomes of our lives, and thus we are able to be safe.

One of my teachers around privatization are waterways. When I observe waterways, like rivers, streams, creeks, and springs I am inspired by how they move across boundaries and borders that demarcate private property. They carry with them this liquid life force that nourishes all that is around, carrying the history of where they had been before.

I have found that often, in nuclear, privatized relationships, the witness or presence of broader community is not one that is seen as appropriate. What is the business of those in partnership with each other, must remain contained in the container of the two people who are romantically involved with one another. To share in the challenges or to be moved by the perspective of others, would be seen as erroneous to the sanctity of the partnership. It would divulge in the weakness of the relationship and be made into a sacrilegious artifact of failure.

Even though this culture expects relationships to look a certain, perfect way, our essence and attraction to being in relationship has within itself, a potential to serve the broader collective. The village is a place in which all people have their sacred role. Where every stage of life holds its own wisdom and its divine guidance.

When we uphold the privatization of nuclear partnership, we also give this formation an unbalanced sense of entitlement, we disregard the other ways of being that inform us of the broader, complexity that we are a part of.

Rather, can we see our partnerships as vehicles in which we can draw on the larger collective? That by committing to a person, we are inviting them into our communities, into the tension of integrating someone who might be holding in them a level of difference to us.

Often, I have seen nuclear partnerships serve the purpose of holding and creating a safe and comfortable container for the two people within it. It can become the place in which we can hold up in our darkest hours and know we will be accepted. This act can be deeply healing and beneficial for those who have never witnessed this type of safety of being seen.

However, after we have been held in that witness by a beloved, there is an opportunity for expansion beyond our partnerships to find places where we can be seen and held by our stories and feelings. The collective spirit in which we are all cultivating can grow through the support of committed relationships that give us a sense of stability to find home in.

If we can see our partnerships like cultivating a well, we might be humbled by those who come to drink and tend to its waters. These are the people who through their presence, reflect to us the purpose and strength of the relationship itself. Their witness, what they are drawn to, is the reflection of what our relationship offers to the community.

It is the dynamism between the broader web of relationships and the partnership that we begin to witness an opening and an exchange that emerges from a core. When we practice privatization, we close ourselves off to the potential and the process of the witness and siphon off the streams of energy that that brings. It is scary to not know what is coming into our relationships, but to be in trust rather than fear, allows us to explore what is possible when the village becomes our witness.